IMPEACH BUSH

"Dedicated to exposing the lies and impeachable offenses of George W. Bush"

Impeach Bush--Index 69

Republicans whine about how bad government is, then they rape the government of every penny
they can get. Cheney did it and now Neil Bush is doing it. Less government means less for us and
more for them.

Congress in the midst of debating legislation to re-authorize the controversial "No Child Left
Behind" (NCLB) program. A three-month long investigation by CREW raises serious questions about
the use of NCLB funds to pay for products sold by Neil Bush, the younger brother of President
George Bush.

CREW is requesting that the Department of Education's Inspector General (IG) investigate why
federal NCLB funds are being spent on educational products sold by Ignite! Learning, a company
founded and headed by Neil Bush. Our letter to the IG can be found here.

Sept. 12, 2007 - In a new embarrassment for the Bush administration's top spymaster, Director
of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is withdrawing an assertion he made to Congress this week
that a recently passed electronic-surveillance law helped U.S. authorities foil a major terror
plot in Germany.

After questions about his testimony were raised, McConnell called Lieberman to clarify his
statements to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, an official
said. (A spokeswoman for Lieberman confirmed that McConnell called the senator Tuesday but could
not immediately confirm what they spoke about.) Late Wednesday afternoon, McConnell issued a
statement acknowledging that "information contributing to the recent arrests [in Germany] was not
collected under authorities provided by the 'Protect America Act'."

Shortly before 10 am on the morning of September 11, 2001, amid rumors of a fourth hijacked
plane headed for Washington, DC, a mystery aircraft appeared in restricted airspace over the White
House. There has never been an official explanation for this incident, which has provided abundant
fuel for 9/11 conspiracy theories.

CNN has now learned from two government sources that the mystery plane was a military aircraft
and has determined that the blurry image on video appears to match photos of the Air Force's E-4B,
a specially modified Boeing 747 with a communications pod behind the cockpit.

The US has suffered a significant loss of power and prestige around the world in the years
since George W. Bush came to power, limiting its ability to influence international crises, an
annual survey from a well regarded British security think-tank concluded on Tuesday.

The 2007 Strategic Survey of the non-partisan International Institute for Strategic Studies
picked the decline of US authority as one of the most important security developments of the past
year – but suggested the fading of American prestige began earlier, largely due to its
failings in Iraq.

But a more fundamental loss of clout occurred at a strategic level. "It was evident that
exercise of military power – in which, on paper, America dominated the world – had not
secured its goal," the survey says. The failings in Iraq created a sense around the world of
American power "diminished and demystified", with adversaries believing they will prevail if they
manage to draw the US into a prolonged engagement.

Bush says one thing, the facts say otherwise. Why does Bush lie? And why has the media let him
get away with all these lies without calling him a liar? They had no problem calling Bill Clinton
a liar and he never lied about anything that had to do national security or his duties as
president. The media remains seriously dysfunctional.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which arguably has the best
track record for producing accurate intelligence assessments, last year estimated that AQI's
membership was in a range of "more than 1,000." When compared with the military's estimate for the
total size of the insurgency—between 20,000 and 30,000 full-time fighters—this figure
puts AQI forces at around 5 percent. When compared with Iraqi intelligence's much larger estimates
of the insurgency—200,000 fighters—INR's estimate would put AQI forces at less than 1
percent. This year, the State Department dropped even its base-level estimate, because, as an
official explained, "the information is too disparate to come up with a consensus number."

For example, by 57% to 43%, those polled back "attacks on coalition forces." This broke down to
93% of Sunnis in favor, 50% of Shia, and 5% of Kurds. In contrast, only 7% of the sample supports
attack on Iraqi forces.

Asked separately, 48% said attacks by al-Qaeda in Iraq on U.S. forces were "acceptable" with
51% finding them unacceptable. Yet only 1% backed al-Qaeda attempts to take over any areas. So
sympathy for al-Qaeda was extremely low -- except when it comes to hitting U.S. troops.

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for
the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew
him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus
discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi
army in 2004-05.

"I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr
Khadim, who now lives in London, said.

U.S. officials say the battle to clean up Iraq's government has suffered a "serious blow" with
the resignation of the nation's top corruption fighter. The former watchdog, Judge Radhi Al Radhi,
tells NBC News that Iraq's current government, headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is
riddled with so much corruption that the U.S. must stop supporting it. Rahdi is now in the United
States, and his departure from the Iraqi government comes just as the U.S. prepares for a key
report from Gen. David Petraeus about the military "surge" in Iraq.

WASHINGTON, May 15 (IPS) - Admiral William Fallon, then President George W. Bush's nominee to
head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition in February to an administration
plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and
vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM, according
to sources with access to his thinking.

Fallon's resistance to the proposed deployment of a third aircraft carrier was followed by a
shift in the Bush administration's Iran policy in February and March away from increased military
threats and toward diplomatic engagement with Iran. That shift, for which no credible explanation
has been offered by administration officials, suggests that Fallon's resistance to a crucial
deployment was a major factor in the intra-administration struggle over policy toward Iran.

Reports suggested that Admiral William Fallon, chief of US Central Command in the region, had
pressed for a significant withdrawal of troops so that there would be sufficient forces for other
pressing challenges.

According to an account to a video-conference meeting beamed to Mr Bush in the White House last
week, he disagreed with General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, who wants to keep as
many troops there as possible. Along with Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, General
Petraeus is expected to tell Congress today that making any significant changes to strategy would
put at risk the fragile political and military progress of recent months. Their report has become
a pivotal moment for Washington and Baghdad.

ONLY 5 per cent of Americans say they trust the Bush Administration to resolve the Iraq
conflict, says a poll published on the eve of the American commander's appearances before
Congress.

The Times/CBS poll published yesterday underscores why the Administration is banking on General
Petraeus and its ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, to convince Republicans in Congress and the
public to stick with the surge strategy.

Twenty-one per cent said they would most trust Congress to resolve the Iraq war while 68 per
cent expressed the most trust in military commanders.

WASHINGTON - Overwhelming numbers of Iraqis say the U.S. troop buildup has worsened security
and the prospects for economic and political progress in their country, according to a poll
released Monday that provides a strikingly bleak appraisal of the war.

Forty-seven percent want American forces and their coalition allies to leave the country
immediately, the survey showed, 12 points more than said so in a March poll as the troop increase
was beginning. And 57 percent — including nearly all Sunnis and half of Shiites — said
they consider attacks on coalition forces acceptable, a slight increase over the past half
year.

Since every conservative in the country was wrong about Iraq and WMD, wrong about tax cuts and
surpluses etc. I think it's safe to say we know conservatives are hot wired to be always be wrong.
They simply don't allow facts to dissuade them.

PARIS (AFP) - The brain neurons of liberals and conservatives fire differently when confronted
with tough choices, suggesting that some political divides may be hard-wired, according a study
released Sunday.

Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the
way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and
complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and
others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers.

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused
head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes
that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

The US has been declining in relative terms for decades. It's only a matter of time before we
bankrupt ourselves. The US debt now stands at $9 trillion. Before the Reagan Revolution it was
only $900 billion. Conservatism and specifically tax cuts are bankrupting the US.

Americans, who grow up believing in their country's exceptionalism (which in foreign policy
terms often seems to mean not believing that the historical constraints that apply to other
nations apply to the U.S.), are not predisposed to believe that American predominance could
possibly be coming to an end. And yet it seems more like wishful thinking than rational analysis
to believe that the United States -- which in the coming decades will certainly have to adapt to a
multipolar world in geo-economic terms, as China and India reoccupy the central place in the
global economy that they had 500 years ago -- can continue indefinitely to play a hegemonic
role.

The truth is that whether it is imperial Rome, imperial Spain or imperial Britain, economic
strength and political strength have always gone together. Because no one denies that the U.S.
will decline in comparative terms economically (though it will almost certainly remain one center
of the world economy), the only way one can believe that geopolitics will not also become
multipolar is to believe that the U.S. is somehow exempt from what seems one of history's few
ironclad laws. And that is not analysis; that is faith.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an
op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general — then in
charge of training and equipping Iraq's security forces — rhapsodized about "tangible
progress" and how the Iraqi forces were "developing steadily," an assessment that may have swayed
some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

Nothing has changed about Mr. Bush's intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans
to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political
progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he
started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American
forces and try to stop Iraq's chaos from spreading.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will disappear by 2050, even
under moderate projections for shrinking summer sea ice caused by greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, government scientists reported on Friday.

The finding is part of a yearlong review of the effects of climate and ice changes on polar
bears to help determine whether they should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Scientists estimate the current polar bear population at 22,000.

The United Nations' top nuclear cop yesterday slammed critics of a new inspection deal with
Iran as "back-seat drivers" trying to justify a war with Tehran in the same way they cleared a
path for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency,
named no names in a briefing for reporters at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna, Austria. But his
harsh words reflected the depth of suspicion and distrust between the Egyptian diplomat and
critics in the United States, both inside and outside the Bush administration.

WASHINGTON - Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, who oversaw the Bush administration's
lengthy legal fight over the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, announced his resignation
Thursday as head of the civil division.

Keisler's departure comes in the wake of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' own resignation.
Keisler is the latest senior official to leave at a time when lawmakers have criticized the
department for not being politically independent from the White House.

WASHINGTON - The number of homeowners receiving foreclosure notices hit a record high in the
spring, driven by problems with subprime mortgages.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported Thursday that mortgage-holders starting the
foreclosure process in the April-June quarter reached 0.65 percent, marking the third consecutive
quarter that this figure has set an all-time high.

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come
under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the
underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence
analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the
military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence
official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the
official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the
military's findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in
August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since
the AP began collecting data in April 2005.

The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained
unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it
did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August.

U.S. and Iraqi alliances with Sunni tribal forces in Anbar province have produced "real and
encouraging" military progress and intelligence cooperation, and there are promising signs they
can be replicated elsewhere. Such relationships, however, "will have to be managed very carefully
in order for them to contribute to Iraq's long-term security."

The Defense Ministry is increasingly capable, though "capacity is hampered by bureaucratic
inexperience, excessive layering, and overcentralization" that undermine the military's readiness
and effectiveness.

Iraqi special operations forces are the most capable and well-trained element of the Iraqi
armed forces, but the border protection force is ineffective.

The Iraqi army is short of "seasoned leadership" at all levels, with a particular shortage of
noncommissioned officers. High levels of army absenteeism strain the system, though there is an
"abundance of volunteers for service."

Logistics remain the Iraqi army's "Achilles' heel," and adequate capability in this area is
"at least 24 months away."

Sectarian problems in local police forces -- as opposed to the national force -- are mitigated
by their deployment within their own ethnic and religious areas, and the force itself is "showing
promise."

The Interior Ministry has "little control" over the 140,000 armed members of the Facilities
Protection Service, which guards government buildings.

MARCH 15 US Congress creates the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, known as the Baker-Hamilton
Commission after co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and directs the group to study the
situation in Iraq and offer policy suggestions.

DECEMBER 6 Iraq Study Group report calls situation in Iraq "grave and deteriorating" and makes
79 policy suggestions, including engaging Syria and Iran in diplomacy. President Bush vows to
study the report carefully, but does not promise to abide by its recommendations.

Bush rejects the Iraq Study Group recommendation to withdraw troops from Iraq, and announces
his decision to send 21,000 more US troops to Iraq as part of a "surge" to pacify Baghdad and
other parts of Iraq. He says this will lead to a political agreement among violently feuding
Shiite and Sunni factions to share political power in Iraq.

WASHINGTON - Congressional auditors gave a stinging assessment of the Homeland Security
Department's progress and said the department could not take credit for the absence of a terrorist
attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

The department's primary mission is to prevent such a strike to and minimize the damage should
an attack occur. Auditors said the U.S. is safer than it was that day in 2001, but the department
has poorly managed its mission over the past four years.

Larry Craig wasn't "the first on my list," the gay blogger says. And the Idaho senator, who
announced his resignation Saturday, "won't be the last."

Rogers, sitting on a club chair in his Northwest Washington apartment, is basking in the
attention. For three years now, he's been a feared one-man machine, "outing," he says, nearly
three dozen senior political and congressional staffers, White House aides and, most damagingly,
Congress members on his blog. On Capitol Hill, a typical phone call from Rogers -- "Are you gay?"
he'd ask -- is "a call from Satan himself," says a former high-ranking congressional staffer whose
name is on the list.

A federal judge struck down controversial portions of the USA Patriot Act in a ruling that
declared them unconstitutional yesterday, ordering the FBI to stop its wide use of a warrantless
tactic for obtaining e-mail and telephone data from private companies for counterterrorism
investigations.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York said the FBI's use of secret
"national security letters" to demand such data violates the First Amendment and constitutional
provisions on the separation of powers, because the FBI can impose indefinite gag orders on the
companies and the courts have little opportunity to review the letters.

Reagan never repudiated any of these right-wing political positions. Yet as president, he caved
in on every one of them. As Joshua Green argued in 2001 in the Washington Monthly, "beyond his
conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one." After taking office, he promised
to "rebuild the foundation of our society" by slashing the size of the federal government, but
during his eight years in office, the federal government expanded. He inveighed against the
deficit, but on his watch the deficit grew enormously. Instead of killing Social Security, he
saved it with a $165 billion bailout. And, most heretically, he raised taxes -- a whopping $100
billion increase over three years, the largest increase in almost 40 years.

By backing the dictatorial regime in El Salvador, which he saw as a bulwark against communism,
Reagan abetted a brutal civil war that cost 75,000 lives. Similarly, his support for the
Nicaraguan Contras, whom he infamously described as "the moral equivalent of our Founding
Fathers," led to fighting that killed as many as 50,000 people. Instead of building on Jimmy
Carter's breakthrough at Camp David, his incompetence and unwillingness to challenge the
right-wing Israeli government of Menachem Begin severely weakened America's ability to broker a
Mideast peace. As the Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote, "The Reagan years saw the demise of
the Great American Mediation Machine in the Middle East." The consequences of Reagan's Mideast
failures haunt us today.

During Reagan's second term, when his conservative supporters realized he was not going to live
up to their expectations, they blamed moderates, who, they said, were tying his hands. Their
deluded mantra was "let Reagan be Reagan." Bush is the living embodiment of that dream of a "real"
Reagan. But the figure from the past is a fake, a Freddy Krueger, wearing a mask adorned not with
a smile but a twisted grimace. By summoning up the wrong Reagan, Bush has brought to life not an
American dream, but an American nightmare.

Sept. 6, 2007 | On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval
Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction,
according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the
Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate
in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which
stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret
intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week
after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The
information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations
to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

It was originally reported that five nuclear warheads were transported, but officers who tipped
Military Times to the incident who have asked to remain anonymous since they are not authorized to
discuss the incident, have since updated that number to six.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American
Scientists, said a host of security checks and warning signs must have been passed over, or
completely ignored, for the warheads to have been unknowingly loaded onto the B-52.

The Defense Department uses a computerized tracking program to keep tabs on each one of its
nuclear warheads, he said. For the six warheads to make it onto the B-52, each one would have had
to be signed out of its storage bunker and transported to the bomber. Diligent safety protocols
would then have had to been ignored to load the warheads onto the plane, Kristensen said.

The nuclear weapons expert said the air force keeps a computerized command and control system
that traces any movement of a nuclear weapon so that they have a complete picture of where they
are at any given time.

He said there would be checks and detailed procedures at various points from the time they are
moved out of bunkers until they are loaded onto planes, and flown away.

"That's perhaps what is most worrisome about this particular incident -- that apparently an
individual who had command authority about moving these weapons around decided to do so," he
said.

As stated in other articles troop deaths are up over last year. Civilian deaths are up. And the
government is dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse. If the surge is a failure, but it was
never intended to succeed. Its real purpose was to buy more time so Bush could keep this war going
and pass it to the next guy.

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military buildup that was supposed to calm Baghdad and other trouble spots
has failed to usher in national reconciliation, as the capital's neighborhoods rupture even
further along sectarian lines, violence shifts elsewhere and Iraq's government remains mired in
political infighting.

In the coming days, U.S. military and government leaders will offer Congress their assessment
of the 6-month-old plan's results. But a review of statistics on death and displacement, political
developments and the impressions of Iraqis who are living under the heightened military presence
reaches a dispiriting conclusion.

Part of this story is incorrect. Australia has become very anti Bush and anti US. The latest
PEW poll says 60% of Australians think the US has a mostly negative influence on the world while
only 29% think most positive/

SYDNEY: Most Australians believe George W Bush is the worst United States president in history,
a poll showed on Tuesday as the US leader headed Down Under for a state visit.

The Galaxy poll, commissioned by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW),
found 52 per cent of Australians rated him the worst, just 32 per cent disagreed while the rest
were undecided.

"Australians are not anti-American, they're anti the policies of George Bush, particularly the
invasion of Iraq," said MAPW spokesman Robert Marr.

RTTNews) - A gloomy assessment on the political and military situation in Iraq released Tuesday
by the Government Accountability Office has drawn criticism from commanders on the ground and
reignited calls for troop withdrawals.

The congressional report, which concluded that Iraq had failed to meet all but two of the nine
security goals Congress had set as part of a list of 18 benchmarks, comes just days before Army
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker deliver their
much-anticipated progress report to federal lawmakers next week.

Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United States soldiers against civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that
govern interrogations and deadly actions.

The documents, released today by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total
nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports
about 22 cases. They show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they
killed local citizens.

The killings include the drowning of a man soldiers pushed from a bridge into the Tigris River
as punishment for breaking curfew, and the suffocation during interrogation of a former Iraqi
general believed to be helping insurgents.

LONDON (AFP) - The British backlash over the US handling of post-invasion Iraq grew Sunday as
another military commander blasted Washington's "fatally flawed" policy.

Major General Tim Cross, the top British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq, said he
raised serious concerns with then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the possibility of
the country descending into chaos.

But Rumsfeld "ignored" or "dismissed" his warnings, the general told the Sunday Mirror
newspaper.

If these were normal times, a time when we had a real congress instead of a rubber stamp
congress, any attempt to take us to war with another country who has not provoked us would result
in impeachment and removal from office within days. But not this congress. Democrats have chosen a
pathetic Speaker who thinks her job is to increase her party control of congress and nothing
more.

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed
to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security
expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week
that US military planners were not preparing for "pinprick strikes" against Iran's nuclear
facilities. "They're about taking out the entire Iranian military," he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign
policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: "Whether you go for
pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same." It
was, he added, a "very legitimate strategic calculus".

The two largest intelligence failures in US history happened under her watch; 911 and WMD. 911
may have been a colossal mistake but the Iraqi War was intentional. Long after she knew the
excuses for war were lies, she continued to defend it and there's no justifiable reason why anyone
should think they can learn anything from someone with little moral standing.

The UN inspectors told us they couldn't find anything in Iraq and instead of waiting until they
found something or sending US inspectors into Iraq she and other idiots supported war. Failure and
idiocy of this magnitude should never be rewarded.

On May 25, Stanford University's independent student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, devoted the
bulk of its front page to the university's former provost, who is on leave while she serves out
her term as secretary of state. "Condi Eyes Return," read the headline, "but in What Role?"

Within hours, the letters to the editor started coming in. "Condoleezza Rice serves an
administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and
honesty. Stanford should not welcome her back," Don Ornstein, an emeritus professor of
mathematics, wrote in a letter published on May 31.

WASHINGTON -- Government secrecy is expanding at an unprecedented clip, despite growing public
concern about barriers to information, a report expected to be released Saturday found.

OpenTheGovernment.orgreports that stamping government documents "secret" cost American
taxpayers $8.2 billion last year -- a 7.5 percent increase over the year before.

The coalition found that for every dollar spent declassifying documents, the federal
government spends $185 to conceal government documents. Over all, classification cost 2
1/2 times what it cost in 1997.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A majority of Americans don't trust the upcoming report by the Army's top
commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn't change their mind,
according to a new poll.

President Bush frequently has asked Congress -- and the American people -- to withhold
judgment on his so-called troop surge in Iraq until Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq,
and Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, issue their progress report in September.

The CEOs who made a fortune off of low interest rates are now wondering why there's the
problem. Not to worry though. The US government knows how to take care of big investors who made
bad investments. They'll get another bailout.

The US financial industry displayed fresh signs of distress from the credit crunch afflicting
global money markets yesterday, with one mortgage provider describing lending conditions as the
worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Leading accountancy firm H&R Block revealed huge losses at its up-for-sale mortgage arm,
Option One, and said it was considering a halt on new loans. Reporting a quarterly loss of $302m
(£150m), Mark Ernst, chief executive, said: "The loan originations market is in the midst of
the most severe dislocation it has seen in years, maybe the most severe since the 1930s."

Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations

Ensuring that the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for outlaws, regardless
of sectarian or political affiliation, as Bush says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has pledged to
do

Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Baathification

Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon
resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and
enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni
Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner

Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and
operational decisions, in consultation with U.S commanders, without political intervention, to
include the authority to pursue all extremists, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite
militias

Ensuring that the Iraqi Security Forces are providing evenhanded enforcement of the law

Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently

Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations
against members of the Iraqi Security Forces

Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local
security

Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission,
provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections

Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review

Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty

Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to
ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the
constitution of Iraq.

The Pentagon is run by idiots who lost a war against an unarmed country and now they don't want
us to learn how bad it is until have the truth is "revised." Give me a break. This war should have
never been fought and after it began it should have been over within weeks.

The Pentagon has asked that some of the negative assessments be revised.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Thursday that after reviewing a draft of the
Government Accountability Office report — which has not yet been made public — policy
officials "made some factual corrections" and "offered some suggestions on a few of the actual
grades" assigned by the GAO.

Whom do we listen to - the liberals who were right about WMD and Iraq not being part of the war
on terror, or the White House, the military and the media who were consistently wrong. Hmmm, I'll
have to get back to you on that one.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most U.S. troops can be withdrawn safely from Iraq in roughly one year
and the Bush administration should begin planning the pullout immediately, according to a study
released Wednesday.

With the exception mostly of two brigades of about 8,000 troops who would remain in the touchy
Kurdish region in the north for a year, trying to guard against conflict with Turkey, the U.S.
troops would be moved to Kuwait initially, says the study by the Center for American Progress, a
self-described "progressive think tank" headed by John D. Podesta, a former chief of staff to
former President Clinton.

Top executives at major U.S. businesses last year made as much money in one day of work on the
job as the average worker made over the entire year, according to a report released on
Wednesday.

Chief executive officers from the nation's biggest businesses averaged nearly $11 million in
total compensation, according to the 14th annual CEO compensation survey released jointly by the
Institute for Policy Studies based in Washington and United for a Fair Economy, a national
organization based in Boston.

BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 — Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of
criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and
other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials
said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.

That federal agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, responded with a
report in October 2006 that found serious discrepancies in American military records of where
thousands of the weapons actually ended up. The military did not take the routine step of
recording serial numbers for the weapons, the inspector general found, making it difficult to
determine whether any of the weapons had ended up in the wrong hands.

In July 2007, the Government Accountability Office found even larger discrepancies, reporting
that the American military "cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 rifles, 90,000 pistols,
80 items of body armor, and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi security forces as of
Sept. 22, 2005."

Where's the money going to come from? The same place the tax cuts came from - we're going to
borrow it. This is the weakest and most pathetic generation this country has created. All the
Democrats have to do is force the GOP to pay for this war with a tax increase and NONE of them
would support it. But, we don't have leaders in either party - we have bumbling idiots.

President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for
the war in Iraq, a White House official said yesterday, a move that appears to reflect increasing
administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S.
forces.

The request -- which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget
and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- is
expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the
two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will
assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this
year.

A U.S. military court in Fort Meade, Maryland has heard opening arguments in the court martial
of the only U.S. military officer charged in connection with the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq.

Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan entered a plea of not guilty Monday to charges of mistreatment
of detainees and disobeying a superior officer. Two more serious charges were dismissed by the
military judge because of technicalities.

A jury of nine Army colonels and one brigadier general promised the court it will not use the
case against Jordan as a judgment on the Abu Ghraib scandal as a whole.

Colonel Jordan, who was in charge of interrogation at the prison, is the only officer to be
court-martialed in the case. Eleven enlisted men and women were convicted, receiving sentences of
up to 10 years in prison.

A more senior officer who admitted approving the use of dogs during interrogation was given a
reprimand and a fine.

A recent op-ed about the war in Iraq charged that upbeat official reports amount to "misleading
rhetoric." It said the "most important front in the counterinsurgency [had] failed most
miserably." And it warned against pursuing "incompatible policies to absurd ends."

Five years into a controversial war, that harsh judgment in a New York Times opinion piece
might not seem surprising, except for this: The authors were seven US soldiers, writing from Iraq
at the end of a tough 15-month combat tour.

WASHINGTON — White House press secretary Tony Snow will leave this month to devote time
to writing, speaking and playing a more active public role in combating cancer, a disease he has
confronted for three roller-coaster years.

Snow is the latest in a long line of senior Bush advisers to leave before the end of the
president's second term. Friday was White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove's last day.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation this week. Former White House
counselor Dan Bartlett, White House attorney Harriet Miers, budget director Rob Portman, political
director Sara Taylor, deputy national-security adviser J.D. Crouch and Meghan O'Sullivan, a
national-security adviser who worked on Iraq, also have stepped down.

WASHINGTON: Weapons that were originally given to Iraqi security forces by the American
military have been recovered over the past year by the authorities in Turkey after being used in
violent crimes in that country, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The discovery that serial numbers on pistols and other weapons recovered in Turkey matched
those distributed to Iraqi police units has prompted growing concern by Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates that controls on weapons being provided to Iraqis are inadequate. It was also a factor in
the decision to dispatch the department's inspector general to Iraq next week to investigate the
problem, the officials said.

BAGHDAD -- Bombings, sectarian slayings and other violence related to the war killed at least
1,773 Iraqi civilians in August, the second month in a row that civilian deaths have risen,
according to government figures obtained Friday.

In July, the civilian death toll was 1,753, and in June it was 1,227. The numbers are based on
morgue, hospital and police records and come from officials in the ministries of Health, Defense
and the Interior. The statistics appear to indicate that the increase in troops ordered by
President Bush this year has done little to curb civilian bloodshed, despite U.S. military
statements to the contrary.